Bowl
Category
Objets de vertu
Date
1700 - 1799
Materials
Lacquer
Measurements
65 mm (Height); 100 mm (Diameter)
Order this imageCollection
Charlecote Park, Warwickshire
NT 534187.6
Summary
One of a pair of bowls (see also 534187.7), lacquer, round with globular sides and flat bases and rims (squat drum shape), made in Japan, probably eighteenth century. It is decorated in hiramaki-e (low relief pictorial lacquer) with buildings and trees on the bank of a river against a fundame (matt gold) ground, the interior with nashiji (‘pear skin ground’) lacquer.
Full description
Small lacquer objects like this were often brought to Europe through the private trade of Dutch East India Company employees returning from Japan (i). Lacquer was particularly fashionable amongst the French court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This bowl and its companion were possibly bought by George Hammond Lucy (1789-1845) at the Fonthill Abbey sale in 1823. The objects at the sale belonged to William Thomas Beckford (1760-1844) a renowned collector. Beckford made his fortune as an absentee enslaver and plantation landlord. He was the fourth generation of enslavers and had inherited fifteen plantations. Over 1,000 were enslaved in his name (ii). Using this wealth, Beckford amassed a collection of art objects and housed them his newly-built gothic abbey. Through financial mismanagement, lawsuits and the decline in sugar profitability, Beckford’s wealth declined. He organised an auction to sell the abbey and his collection in 1822 (iii). The auction did not proceed as the entirety of the estate was privately purchased (iv). However, the new buyer arranged a second auction of Beckford’s collection in 1823, attended by George Hammond Lucy. This particular item cannot be accurately identified in the 1823 Fonthill Abbey sale catalogue, nor in the original 1822 catalogue. It is still possible that this lacquer box was purchased at the sale, as it is recorded that George Hammond Lucy purchased 13 or 14 lacquer pieces from the sale (v). His wife, Mary Elizabeth Lucy (1803-90) recorded all the lacquerware in the Billiard Room was purchased at the Fonthill Abbey sale, although it is not clear which particular items she was referring to (vi). (i) Oliver Impey and John Whitehead, ‘Japanese Lacquer’ in Derek E. Ostergard, William Beckford 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001), pp 218-219. (ii) 'William Thomas Beckford', Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, UCL, accessed 30/05/2024. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/22232 (iii) See Boyd Alexander, (trans. and ed.), Life at Fonthill 1807-1822 With Interludes in Paris and London. From the Correspondence of William Beckford, (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957); England’s Wealthiest Son: A Study of William Beckford, (London: Centaur Press Lt., 1962); Amy Frost, ‘The Beckford Era’ in Caroline Dakers (ed.), Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, (London: UCL Press, 2018), pp. 59-93. (iv) Caroline Dakers ‘The break-up of the Fonthill estate’ in Dakers (ed.), Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, (London: UCL Press, 2018), pp. 97-98. (v) Warwickshire County Record Office, L6/1116; Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750-1850 (London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 217-218. (vi) Mary Elizabeth Lucy, Biography of the Lucy Family at Charlecote Park in the County of Warwick, (London: privately printed by Emily Faithful & Co, 1862), p.131.